Looking Back and Looking Forward — Who Could Have Seen This Coming?

(Looking Back and Looking Forward takes a look at the articles and posts I found interesting from the previous week, along with reflections about how the trends they point to might shape my thinking about education, technology, and culture.)

Who could have seen this coming?

An industry boom creates an optimistically unrealistic vision of perpetual growth, spurring heavy spending and expansion, only to transform into an attitude of austere pragmatism that leads to large-scale organization adjustments (aka massive layoffs).

Boom to bust to boom to bust etc.

Well, you live long enough, or you grow up in an oil-rich state, and you have a chance to see it over and over again. Of course, if you’ve been paying attention to such patterns, you’ve also seen similar, recurring patterns in real estate,

You live long enough and you’ve seen plenty of repeatable patterns in your life, in real estate, family dynamics, the weather, well… you get it. You learn to see and understand what’s happening along with an understanding of what is likely to happen next. The only question is when will the next cycle begin.

And so we have Big Tech companies, all of whom expanded aggressively in the pandemic as people turned to different technologies to keep them connected, that are now discovering austerity. You say this is a “year of efficiency,” I say it’s a return to reality. Along those lines, it’s not surprising to see Google playing “fast follower” and rushing to release new AI features into its search engine “very soon.”

Meanwhile, in China, Baidu has announced its own plans to release its own version of a CHatGPT service. This reminds me of a major point made by Kai-Fu Lee in his book AI Superpowers — China’s potential advantage in developing AI solutions comes from the massive amounts of centralized data collected through super apps.

Oh, and in case some of you are still wondering how we got here with generative AI, you might want to check out this brief history/primer.

Moving on to higher education, the good news is that fall enrollments in the U.S. this academic year showed, while down slightly, showed evidence of stabilizing. Freshman enrollments we actually up. Ever lurking in the background, however, are the two shadows: (1) a shrinking pool of high school graduates due, in part to declining birth rates, and; (2) a growing number of alternatives to the traditional four-year degree, which is becoming too expensive for many.

While this leads many to question how colleges and universities can compete in this “new world,” others are asking a more fundamental question: What are universities for? Is their purpose to provide pathways for gainful employment and professional success or to promote “flourishing” and contribute to a more enlightened and reflective society?

The answer to that question is ever-evolving but it is worth noting that employers may be reversing a trend that began more than fifty years ago by hiring more people without a college degree. That is good news overall, I think, but there are challenges inherent in moving away from the blanket workforce entry visas provided by college degrees, This means that employers must become more granular in their definition of job roles and be able to align job requirements (and certifications) accurately to those roles.

There were plenty of posts in education circles week about generative AI, ChatGPT, and AI’s likely impact on education. The discussions ranged from unflipping the classroom and new ways to create learning assignments to education and subject-specific implementations of generative AI and the need to overcome our AI fears (also see Michale Feldstein’s related post). I really liked Adam Croom’s thoughtful post about how he introduced ChatGPT in his Contemporary Problems in Advertising class. And Donald Clark does a good job of focusing/refocusing the AI in learning discussion by looking at innovations in semantic search and other ways that AI is changing how we learn and teach.

Finally, on the related topic of science and culture, I recommend a quick read of this article on James Joyce’s references to physics in Ulysses.

The fact that Ulysses contains so much classical physics should not be surprising,” Manos wrote. “Joyce’s friend Eugene Jolas observed: ‘the range of subjects he [Joyce] enjoyed discussing was a wide one … [including] certain sciences, particularly physics, geometry, and mathematics.’ Knowing physics can enhance everyone’s understanding of this novel and enrich its entertainment value. Ulysses exemplifies what physics students (science and non-science majors) and physics teachers should realize, namely, physics and literature are not mutually exclusive.

If Joyce could see that physics and literature are not mutually exclusive, perhaps we can make some room for AI and education.

Looking Back and Looking Forward — Who Could Have Seen This Coming?

Further Reading

Higher Education

K-12

Workforce and Employment

Online Learning, Learning Design, and Education Technology

Technology and Culture